The personal blog of Peter Lee a.k.a. "China Hand"... Life is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel, and an open book to those who read. You are welcome to contact China Matters at the address chinamatters --a-- prlee.org or follow me on twitter @chinahand.

Monday, July 25, 2016

Trumputin! And the Leak(s)

I’m reading Sterling Seagrave’s epic account of the
Philippines under Marcos, The Marcos
Dynasty, and just happen to be at the part where Edward Lansdale and the
CIA are painstakingly molding Ramon Magsaysay into the magnificent vessel that
will contain American aspirations in the Philippines.Lansdale did everything but tie Magsaysay’s
shoes.Then Magsaysay died in a plane
crash and it was time for rinse-and-repeat with Ferdinand Marcos.

Democracies, for all their virtues, are especially
vulnerable to manipulation during election season, when pols need money, good
press, and, sometimes impunity.You don’t
get those quadrennial opportunities when wrassling with a dictator-for-life. I
suspect that’s one reason why the United States, George Soros, et. al. are so
keen on promoting democracy overseas. The process creates an attractive portfolio of
weak, venal, and competing clients.

Tempting to exploit that. Especially for Putin since it’s been bruited
about that his bete noire, cookie merchant Victoria Nuland, will be running the
State Department if Clinton wins the presidency.

So I’m not averse to the theory that Vladimir Putin is
behind the Wikileaks DNC leak.

Putin probably doesn’t consider himself the first offender
when it comes to leaking embarrassing and destabilizing info.

He believes that the Panama Papers dump—sluiced by a noble
anonymous hacker into that responsible Western whistleblowing conduit, the
International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, for loving curation by
mainstream journos, instead of transomed into the hands of that irresponsible
and oh-so-interesting gotta-dump-it-all Wikileaks anti-American cowboy channel—was
part of an effort to target him.

I think Panama Papers was a US-orchestrated inflection point
in the American campaign to destroy international bank secrecy, but
whatever.Plenty of anti-Putin hay was
made out of the leak.

More to the point is this
report on statements by Senator Bob Corker via Radio Free Europe, natch!

A senior U.S. lawmaker
says revelations about Russian President Vladimir Putin’s wealth will be
“destabilizing” to his rule as the Russian population becomes increasingly
aware of them.

U.S. Senator Bob Corker, the Republican chairman of the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee, told Voice Of America on February 1 that the Russian
people "are beginning to realize they have a leader that amassed
tremendous personal wealth."

Corker said that revelation was "going to create some additional
instability in Russia."

…

Corker’s remarks come in the midst of
a diplomatic dispute between Washington and Moscow over a BBC interview given
last week by Adam Szubin, the U.S. Treasury's acting secretary for terrorism
and financial crimes.

Szubin told the BBC that Putin was "a picture of corruption," and the
White House later said that his remarks reflected the views of the Obama
administration about Putin.The Kremlin reacted angrily to the
interview and Earnest’s statement, calling it "outrageous and
insulting."

Both Russian and
Western media outlets during the past year have reported previously undisclosed
details about the affluent, well-connected lives led by Putin’s two daughters.

Putin's younger daughter, according to Reuters, also has identified herself as
a "spouse" of Kirill Shamalov, the son of wealthy Putin associate
Nikolai Shamalov.

The couple is thought to have corporate holdings worth about $2 billion.

Treasury’s “terrorism and financial crimes” operation is in
the business of hoovering up financial information by any and all means on
America’s enemies, especially by compromising the confidentiality of banks
doing sanctions-busting business with Iran.Undoubtedly, it has acquired a nice thick Putin folder thanks to various
savory and unsavory ops, and dropping that file is a threat they like to
brandish before Putin.

So, no question Putin coulda done DNCleaks and not lost any sleep
over it.

But did he?

Maybe we’ll never know.

I’ve written before on the attribution
circus: how it’s necessary to sculpt an incriminating dossier even when all
you’ve got is ambiguity and circumstantial evidence, because America can’t have
foreigners hacking the bejeezus out its servers and then saying, Well, looks
like X but…can’t really say for sure.

Instead, we get cybersecurity companies massaging
assumptions and cherrypicking data—and downplaying indications that US
government hacking tools have been turned against us-- so they can say “we
believe” in an impressively scientific manner.This conclusion is fed to the media machine and eventually emerges from
the journalistic nether parts as “X did it.”

Did Putin orchestrate DNCleaks?Maybe, maybe not.Coulda been the FSB team.Coulda been China.Coulda been Anonymous.Doesn’t matter too much in my opinion.The dirt was left lying there for somebody to
scoop up.

One thing for sure is that the Clinton campaign is desperate
to find a bigger villain to shift the focus away from the DNC’s abysmal
security practices and sleazy electioneering revealed by the leak.

Cue Trumputin!

Aside from the possibility that Putin passed the DNC trove
to Julian Assange to embarrass and discommode Hillary Clinton, I’m considerably
more skeptical about the “Donald Trump is Putin’s agent” story that’s been
burning up the Internet.

Trump doesn’t seem to
be the kind of guy that could be run safely and reliably as a foreign agent,
either directly or through a cut-out like Paul Manafort.I suspect the US government has a huge embarrassing
file on Manafort thanks to his relationship with Dimitry Firtash, the gas
industry fixer who was Russia’s main man in Ukraine, but I’m wondering if unpacking
Manafort’s and Trump’s interests in Eastern Europe will reveal more than a lust
for oligarch cash and the first-hand perspective that the US/NATO anti-Russia
policy orchestrated by Hillary Clinton and Victoria Nuland is a dead-end sh*t
show.

To me, the most interesting perspective on the allegations
of perfidious Russian involvement in the Trump campaign is the effort to gin up
an outsized moral panic around the prospect of the Trump presidency.

He’s a grafter and a scammer who probably expects to lose
the election and milk his followers for a few more millions over the next
decade via a cheesy post-Fox media/political conglomerate.

Trump, I think, would make a terrible president.But a terrible president whose best as well
as worst impulses would be swiftly neutralized by threats of resignation/insubordination/impeachment/mutiny
by the Beltway pros if he really tried to color outside the lines.

I don’t think he’s a fascist with the energy or inclination
to seize state power as leader of a racist mass movement with paramilitary
power employing riot, murder, insurrection, and genocide to achieve
supersized ambitions for national and world mastery.

Is anti-Trump hysteria just part of the electoral race to
the bottom, the need to make him appear even less attractive than Hillary?

Or is it…something more?

At this point, everybody pause for a moment and put on their
tin-foil hats.

OK…everybody ready?Good.

Here’s my take on the whole megillah.

The Clinton campaign is in a quiet panic that the notorious
e-mail server in Hillary Clinton’s basement got hacked and the 33,000 e-mails were exfiltrated for release at the worst possible moment during the election. Like maybe during the convention in Philadelphia.

If the 33,000 deleted e-mails are just yoga appointments and
instructions to florists, it’ll be bad but not fatal.

If they reveal embarrassing political and media canoodling,
worse, politically survivable, but electoral poison.

If it turns out that there was official business discussed
in some e-mails and Clinton’s lawyers deleted them instead of turning them over
to the State Department, I think it’s Hello, President Trump.

If the deleted mails contained classified info, then it’s
lights out.Democrats push her to
withdraw from the race soon enough so that nice Mr. Kaine can carry the ticket,
and Clinton spends the next few years in court.

Nobody knows what could come out, I think. If there were some skeletons in the e-mail server, only Hillary Clinton and her closest associates know. For everybody else, it's pucker up, hope for the best, and expect the worst.

All they know is, any leak of e-mails from the Clinton server is
bad.What to do?What to do? What’s the plan? How does the campaign inoculate against such a
potentially devastating development?

How about a major redirect, one that turns any leak into
evidence of Putin perfidy?Aha!

Here’s how I think it works.

First, harden the narrative that Putin is backing Trump.Time to reach out to prestige media!

Instantaneously and simultaneously, serious chin-stroking
erupts in the liberal commentariat concerning the seemingly unhealthy
relationship between Putin and Trump.

Over in digital media, Talking Points Memo has been pushing
the story relentlessly.Most recent
iteration: It Can’t Be
Dismissed.

What’s interesting to me is that none of these pieces offer
conclusive evidence.We are in the zone
of those two glorious media and rhetorical exemplars, Peggy Noonan and Donald
Rumsfeld.

As in:

Is it irresponsible to
speculate?It would be irresponsible not
to.Peggy Noonan, on the
Wall Street Journal editorial page, as to whether Fidel Castro used
incriminating phone-sex recordings to blackmail President Bill Clinton into
returning miracle dolphin lad Elian Gonzalez to his father in Cuba.

Absence of evidence is
not evidence of absence.Donald Rumsfeld, on
why we shouldn’t worry that UN inspectors found no WMD in Iraq pre-invasion.

What is most amusing, profiles-of-courage wise is that both
Drezner and Marshall are hedging their bets (or covering their asses) in case
the story doesn’t pan out in the body, while pushing the theory in the headline
of their articles.

Anyway, Trumputin now part of the zeitgeist and the Clinton campaign has done the best it can to prepare
for a leak to drop during convention primetime.